Analysis: Apple plays it safe with iPad gaming

Apple's iPad holds some unique possibilities for gaming, but what the company showed at the overly hyped tablet's unveiling on Wednesday barely scratched the surface.

The tech demos that mobile game makers like Gameloft and Electronic Arts showed at the briefing were tweaked versions of the companies' iPhone games, adding a few new features that rely on the iPad's bigger screen: In first-person shooter Nova, players can drag a mini-map around the screen, resizing it to their liking. In the auto racing game Need for Speed: Shift, you can look at the cars behind you just by tapping your rear-view mirror.

While these features might be possible on the iPhone, the gestures involved would be so minute that they would be fiddly and unworkable on the small screen. On the iPad, the vast expanse of screen makes more things possible.

"The display is just huge, which makes the game immensely fun to play," said Gameloft's Mark Hickey of Nova on the iPad. "The size also gives you more flexibility when it comes to controlling the game."

Electronic Arts' Travis Boatman sounded jubilant as he described the iPad. "It's a little bit like holding a high-definition television just inches from your face," he said.

If only he had then shown something that looked more fun than a clickable mirror.

The iPad is Apple's attempt to straddle the PC and mobile markets with a device that combines the iPhone's minimalist touch interface with the productivity of a full-size computer. With models ranging from $500 to more than $800 (about £300 to £500), the iPad will pretty much let users do everything: Watch movies in high resolution, read e-books, run spreadsheets and play every single thing in the App Store. Almost all of the 140,000 iPhone apps will run on iPad, either in a small window or blown up to fill the entire screen.

But the only way to get gamers to buy it is to introduce exclusive killer apps. Jesse Divnich, an analyst with Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, says that these might be slow in coming.

"From a gaming perspective, the success of iPad as a serious gaming platform depends entirely on its ability to have a large installed base of gamers," Divnich said. "Publishers need to be reassured by Apple that [it's] going to get at least a 20 million installed base in the next couple of years."

Otherwise, Divnich says, the big publishers won't come running -- they'll experiment with iPad-only games, but won't jump in feet-first the way that book publishers and movie studios will.

After the presentation, Apple let attendees get hands-on time with the iPad. But neither of the iPad-exclusive tech demos were available, just a selection of as-is iPhone games. It's no more or less fun to play iPhone games on the bigger screen. Notably, 3D titles such as Super Monkey Ball looked very good when blown up to full-screen size on the tablet, surviving the transition better than games built on 2D art, which tended to get blurry and pixelated.

With its 1GHz processor, the iPad is more powerful than the iPhone 3GS -- but it's still not exactly a gaming workhorse. The success of the relatively underpowered Wii console has shown that this doesn't matter so much if the content is right. But playing iPhone games on an iPad makes the Wii look like a PlayStation 3. Will gamers throw down five bills for the privilege?

Milling about the room after Apple's presentation Wednesday was Mark Rein, vice president of Unreal Engine maker Epic Games. He said his company would seek to bring "the big-boy console gaming experience" to iPad, which he gushed over after getting some demo time.

"What's not to love?" he said. "The quality of the device, the feel of it in your hand is unbelievable. I love the upgraded apps, I love the form factor. I think it'll be a fantastic device for gaming."

Rein showed me a tech demo of a first-person shooter running on a version of his company's engine designed for the iPhone. As consumers use the iPad and become accustomed to the high-quality display for books and movies, they will demand increasingly better games, Rein said.

"When you go and play this on a big huge screen, it's not an Xbox 360," he said. "But the point is that when you have the experience on (the 10-inch screen), it's not that long before you can do really spectacular-looking games on this device, and that's what we want to be."

That's where we'd all like to be, and where iPad could be. But it isn't there today.